Thoughts from a Conservative point of view in regards to technology

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End Trucking Trade War

In the editorial section of my local paper I learned about a little known success of President Bush’s that was overturned by the Democratic congress in the stimulus package.

According to the article, under the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States and Mexico agreed to open boarders to each other’s trucks. A truck driver in Mexico could drive the truck across the border and keep driving. The US already had a similar agreement with Canada.

In 2000 this arrangement between Mexico and the United States was supposed to go into effect, but the International Brotherhood of Teamsters blocked this. Now what happens is a a Mexican truck driver has to offload any shipment in the United States and then the shipment needs to be loaded on an American truck.

Opponents of this argued that allowing a Mexican truck to drive in America is a safety risk and especially in a post-911 world it is a national security risk. However these objections were more about loosing jobs for Teamsters and not about safety and security.

President Bush implemented a program in 2007 that allowed a limited amount of trucks from Mexico to continue driving.

This program all changed in the stimulus package the Democrats recently passed.

Why should one care about this? The government fought back against this by declaring a tariff (which it was allowed to do under NAFTA) for a total of $2.4 billion. The state I’m from (Michigan) is one of those states affected by these tariffs. The article states that Appleton Papers in Wisconsin supplies 75 percent of the paper that Mexico uses, now thanks to the tariffs laid against them, they are looking to lay people off